Pippi Longstocking The Psychopath

Is Pippi Longstocking a psychopath? Before you dismiss the idea out of hand, a little bit of psychopathy can be a beneficial thing for the individual. An evolutionary advantage, in fact.

Episode 59 of the We Hate Movies podcast pretty much rips the hell out of The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking. I have not seen this film, but I have it on very good authority that the book is far better than the atrocity which is the screen adaptation, despite all of the problems associated with the book.

The closest I’ve come to this film is watching the Gilmore girls enjoy an earlier adaptation. After listening to the detailed rundown of the 1980s film adaptation from the We Hate Movies guys, Lorelai’s apprecation of this story explains to me some of her most annoying traits — her insistence on flouting the rules, of taking advantage of strangers at a funeral, of eating copious amounts of free wedding cake at a small business owner’s expense, of dumping a stranger’s secondhand mattress on a friend… that kind of thing.

And then one of the We Hate Movies guys pointed out that Pippi is likely an example of a psychopath, which sounds like a complete exaggeration, unless you understand that psychopathy is not a binary condition; rather, we are all somewhere on a continuum. This is explained nicely in another podcast altogether, this time from a science podcast.

Stieg Larsson, he who wrote The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series, said that Lisbeth Salander was inspired by Pippi Longstocking:

This delightful and formidable little girl has been a champion of equality between the sexes: she doesn’t depend on anyone, can use a revolver, has sailed the seven seas … But the main thing about Pippi is that she has her own ideas about right and wrong—and she lives by them, no matter what the law or adults say.

Kevin Dutton wrote a book called The Wisdom Of Psychopaths. He is very interesting in interview. You can listen to him speak about psychopaths, and how his own father was a psychopath at the Science Talk podcast.

It turns out psychopathy is fascinating. We’re attracted to such characters, perhaps trying to understand them, maybe because in small tribes such people would be useful and dangerous in equal measure.

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So, for anyone who has a good understanding of psychopathy, and who is also familiar with the Pippi Longstockings brand, where might she fit on the spectrum? What would have happened to Pippi Longstocking in a grown up novel about the adult Pippi? The New York Times has already speculated, and draws a discomfiting connection to Lisbeth Salander.

Yikes.

Apparently Hayao Miyazaki considered turning Pippi Longstocking into a movie and some concept art was even created, but he eventually decided to flag it. I wonder if Miyazaki thought Pippi Longstocking was too much of a psycho? After all, he prefers nice, well-rounded protagonists.

Who is from classic children’s literature might be a psychopath? What about Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden, unloved until the age of ten? Then again, maybe it wasn’t too late for Mary, who was reformed about being sent to the country:

Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for some one.